Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, July 16, 2003

If you are one of those people who can see poetry in stone, then the story of Richard Rhodes may need no explanation.

Since 1984 he has traveled the world in search of stones for use in the construction of houses. The stones that Rhodes, a principal of Rhodes Architectural Stone, a Seattle salvage firm, sought out were often to be found in quarries.

Six years ago, though, Rhodes was in China hunting a specific type of granite to use in building a house for Larry Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle. Ellison wanted to re-create a 15th century Japanese temple complex in the hills south of San Francisco. Rhodes was looking for granite of a color that complemented the tawny Bay Area light.

While in China, Rhodes happened on a material that, as it turned out, he considered more precious. This occurred during a side trip to the famous gorge of the Yangtze River, an evanescent landscape celebrated in art and poetry and soon to be inundated by the waters of a $25 billion hydroelectric project called the Three Gorges Dam.

The dam would drown monuments and temples and villages where Chinese culture had evolved uninterrupted for millennia.

"Everyone knew about the ecological impact and about all the historic stuff like temples being inundated," Rhodes said. What Rhodes had not fully realized before his visit was that there was another kind of wealth in the valley, in the form of old stones from the nearly 1,600 condemned villages.

"Most people go to see the gorge," Rhodes said by telephone from his headquarters in Seattle. "But the truth is, I'm really interested in epic construction."

The construction Rhodes referred to was the dam first extolled by Mao Zedong, plotted for decades by Chinese leaders, bitterly debated on cultural and ecological grounds and, by the time he saw it, being brought to completion by an army of 10,000 laborers wielding shovels and picks.

All along the river Rhodes found condemned dwellings, disused staircases, outbuildings, paving stones, battlements that dated to the centuries when the Yangtze was the source of China's trade and life.

"To see these beautiful worn materials lost seemed like a tragedy," he said.

So he bought them.

"We negotiated for two years," said Rhodes, who began the the recovery project with a $100,000 grubstake and a speculative plan to harvest old rocks and then warehouse them in China, to be sawed and milled in the United States as orders arrived.

There were materials from 11 villages in all, little of it considered by preservationists to be of cultural consequence. The only stones under official protection are those, like carvings, that are considered to have artistic value. Besides, he said, local bureaucrats were too pressed by the problems of resettlement to concern themselves with material they considered scrap.

The stones themselves were in the form of paving, house veneers, sills and lintels; beautiful, bisque-colored, streaked with iron and magnesium and occasionally traced with the fossil remains of sea creatures.

As Rhodes pointed out, geological origins are only part of the history of an old stone. He is, he said, in "the story business as much as the stone business." The stones he sells in bulk are not in any sense the Elgin marbles; all the same, they carry the freight of romantic association as any souvenir.

"This felt like a rare opportunity to use material that had been walked on and worn and lived in for thousands of years," said Steven Steinman, a former Nasdaq trader who is deeply invested in Yangtze River stone.

Having taken early retirement from a brokerage firm, the Knight Trading Group, Steinman decided to build a family compound on 47 acres that he and his wife, Diana, had acquired in Greenwich, Conn. The entire facade of a baronial 37,000-square-foot manor house, designed in a style reminiscent of the British imperial architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, is to be built of Yangtze River stone.

So, for that matter, are the terraces, the garden hardscape, the chimneys, the outbuildings, the motor court and the roadway leading through an allee of Norway maples. By Rhodes' estimate, each container shipped from China holds 20 tons of stone. The Steinman house, Rhodes said, "is a 200-container job."

The financial scale of the job is, if anything, more daunting: The cost of rock veneer recovered from the Yangtze River valley is $35 a square foot on average. A square foot of antique pavement costs $44.

"The rule of thumb is that recovered stone is three times the price" of standard quarry products, said Rhodes, who formed his company in 1984 to specialize in supplying construction materials for what he terms "multiyear residential projects." For Steinman, the cost of the stone accounts for 15 percent of the overall budget for his multimillion-dollar house.

The clients behind Rhodes' projects have tended to be people whose fancies are as outsize as those of any 19th century plutocrat: Ellison with his Japanese temple; a coffee executive who constructed a vast mansion styled as an Irish "cottage"; a vintner whose estate in Napa is paved with bisque- colored Chinese stone.

The Yangtze River rock, Steinman said, "is an expensive material, and there was some anxiety about buying a material from a vendor that is far away." But Steinman's initial concerns were offset, he said, by the "sheer beauty" of the Chinese stone, which is similar in composition to the fabled stone from Bath, England, and equally by its provenance. "The narrative was very appealing," he said.

"We're building a home for our family to live in and for our children hopefully to have one day," he added, "and there was something irresistible in using these rocks that have been walked on and worn and lived in for thousands of years." By using stones recovered from a world now vanishing under water, he said, he hopes to give his own house "the look and feel as if it had been there a long time."